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Thursday, 28 May 2020

“Society is still worth protecting, don’t you think?
Maybe now more than ever.”

-– Saleema Nawaz, Songs for the End of the World

Almost two months ago, the Montreal writer, Saleema Nawaz
received considerable attention in the Canadian media for her novel Songs for the End of the World, about a
respiratory pandemic ravaging 2020 America that bears startling similarities to
the current COVID-19 Virus. Among them: the devastation of New York City from a
mysterious infectious virus that originated in China; the inconvenience of self
quarantines; the individuals on the front line – police and health care workers
– risking their lives to save the lives of individuals afflicted with this
virulent pathogen; the need for personal protective gear; social distancing
ordinances; conspiracy theories posted on social media, and anti-Asian hate
crimes. The novel took six years to research and write, and Nawaz’s imagination,
combined with her knowledge about previous pandemics from the Spanish flu
(1918-1920) to SARS, is etched into her narrative. Still, given her prescience,
it is unsurprising that Songs,scheduled to be published in late
August, was rushed into an e-book in early April.

Saturday, 25 April 2020

"It's about:
What if the magnetic forces at work in our country were just given a little
push in one direction. What if a certain kind of intolerance was just given a slight nod from powers on high?"

– Zoe Kazan, actor on the HBO series, The Plot Against America

“History
is a nightmare from which none of us can wake.”

– James Joyce, Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man

This
review contains spoilers

Michelle K. Short of HBO photographed the screenshots

In Anti
Social, a riveting account of the alt-right online trollers who elevate the
persuasive narrative above any semblance of accuracy, evidence or fairness,
Andrew Marantz interjects the wisdom of the philosopher, Richard Rorty, who
contends that history is not preordained but is contingent and depends on the
way people bend its arc. I thought about Rorty and Marantz’s far-right profiles
as I reread The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth and watched the six-part gripping HBO mostly-faithful television
adaptation by creator David Simon and his collaborator Ed Burns, widely known
for their productions among others of The
Wire and Treme. I found the
gradual slide into fascism in America more convincing in The Plot than I did when I first read it in 2004 – likely because
of the current American political climate – and that the Simon’s and Burns’s rendition
offers innovations that enhance the relevance of the novel by creatively blurring
the distinction between the early 1940s setting and our time.

Monday, 20 April 2020

“The past is intrinsic to the present, despite any
attempts to dismiss it.”

—Ariana Neumann

Ariana Neumann’s moving, beautifully-written memoir, When Time Stopped: A Memoir of my Father’s War and What Remains by Ariana Neumann
(Scribner 2020) chronicles her search to shed light on the early secretive life of
her Czech-born father, Hans, whom she remembers as an art-collecting,
successful philanthropic business man. But her account is as much a mystery as
a memoir because she combines the tools of both a sleuth and historian to
unearth her father’s life.

Currently, a
London based journalist, Ariana spent her formative years in a well-heeled home
nestled in Caracas Venezuela. Although her father’s early life for her was
basically a tabula rasa, she remembers awaking to her father’s screams uttered
in a foreign language. He would say nothing about what provoked these
nightmares and he discouraged her from asking questions. At that time, raised
as a Catholic, she did not even know she was Jewish. Later as a college student
when they both travelled to his homeland in Czechoslovakia, Hans revealed little, apart from a sob near
an old railroad station: “Sometimes you have to leave the past where it is—in
the past.” The underlying purpose of his daughter’s research and writing is to
challenge that assumption.

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 2

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 1

About Me

Author of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions (2012) and second volume, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions (2013).